Performance

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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In 2006 I was invited to participate in Art Inside the Park, a four-day event, in Jefferson City, Missouri featuring sculptural installation and performance. Sixteen artists from Missouri, California, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Toronto, Canada contributed their work.

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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Since Jefferson City is the state capital and, as such, is the focal point of much of the bureaucracy designed to serve the people of Missouri, I though it would be appropriate to create a piece poking fun at these necessary but often infuriating systems.

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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Entrenched Bureaucrat consisted of a 3’ x 4’ x 3’ deep excavation into which I placed a wooden casement designed to support the weight of dozens of sandbags filled with the displaced soil.

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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Each day, at 8 a.m., I would enter the entrenchment and sit under my umbrella until closing time at 5 p.m. During this time, I did not allow myself to leave the entrenchment.

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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I chose to wear a suit, tie and hat to evoke the generic business costume of a typical male office worker.

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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Initially, I had intended to remain silent and to not interact with the public in order to mimic an inert and unresponsive bureaucracy whose main function was simply to protect itself. However, many mid-Missouri schools used Art Inside the Park as a teaching opportunity and bussed over 2,500 elementary school kids to the event over the course of the four days.

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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When the kids would see that there was a man sitting in a hole under the umbrella they would, fearlessly and without fail, climb up to join me. For the better part of the exhibition, my supposedly isolated entrenchment looked like an ant-hill covered with kids all shouting questions at me simultaneously.

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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Under these circumstances, I found it impossible to remain silent

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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In order of importance, the kids wanted to know the following: How do you go to the bathroom? (answer: I don’t. I just hold it.) How do you eat? (answer: I’ve got a cooler in here loaded with all sorts of good stuff.) Why are you dressed like Abraham Lincoln? (answer: Any resemblance is purely coincidental but I’m flattered that I remind you of such a great guy) And finally, what’s a bureaucrat?

Entrenched Bureaucrat

Performance

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This last question was quite a challenge. Try explaining bureaucracy to a seven-year old sometime.

Music Box

Performance

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In 2007 I was again invited to participate in Art Inside the Park, a four-day exhibition of sculptural installation and performance in Jefferson City, Missouri. Sixteen artists from Missouri, California, Illinois, France and Spain were represented.

Music Box

Performance

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Since the exhibition took place on the grounds of the state capital that year, any alteration of the site as in Entrenched Bureaucrat (2006) was prohibited. Therefore, I chose to build a modular piece that could be transported in sections and quickly assembled on site.

Music Box

Performance

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The resulting 3’ x 4’ x 7’ tall cage-like construction was designed to look like a child’s play-house painted in bright, Fisher-Price colors. Since Fisher-Price is often associated with educational toys, the intent was to evoke the setting of an early childhood learning activity or environment.

Music Box

Performance

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Each day I would enter Music Box through a concealed trap-door in the floor at 8 a.m. and remain sealed inside until checking out at 5 p.m. While inside, I would spend the day attempting to teach myself to play the violin without the benefit of any instruction.

Music Box

Performance

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The noises that I brought forth ranged from the unpleasant to the truly horrific.

Music Box

Performance

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The idea I wanted the viewer (or any state legislators who happened to walk by) to contemplate was the place of education in the arts. We get what we pay for. Without teachers, each generation would have to re-invent the wheel. Cultural literacy would give way to the atonal screechings of well-intentioned but ignorant fumblers such as myself.

Music Box

Performance

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Again, mid-Missouri schools bussed several hundred elementary school kids to the event over the course of the four days.

Music Box

Performance

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When the kids would ask me what I was doing, I’d reply, “Imagine a world with no teachers where you all had to learn everything on your own from scratch. I’m in here trying to teach myself to play the violin without a teacher. Sounds pretty bad, huh?”

Music Box

Performance

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They would think about this for a moment and try to imagine their world with no teachers. Unfortunately, I should have guessed that they’d think this was a great idea. No teachers would mean no school which would mean more time for TV! Yay!

Music Box

Performance

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To which I’d reply with another noxious blast from the violin.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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Art Inside the Park was held in the Old Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City in 2008. Twenty-five artists from Missouri, Washington D.C., New York City and Granada, Spain contributed sculptural installations and performances.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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Given the history of the site, it seemed appropriate to design a piece that examined the judicial system in America and one’s potential experience within that system.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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Since this debate is social in nature and involves multiple parties with multiple points of view, fellow artist Valerie Wedel and I decided to collaborate in order to imitate an adversarial, binary system.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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As we all know, one’s trajectory through the legal system in America (or anywhere else for that matter) is dependent on the quality of one’s representation. This, in turn, is dependent on one’s financial status. The more money one has, the better the defense one can buy.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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Effective communication is central to this process. The better the legal team, the better the communication. If anything is garbled in transmission, bad things can happen.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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To introduce the potential for lethal mis-communication, Valerie and I chose to separate ourselves by over 100 yards and to exchange information solely by means of signal flags.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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We took turns playing the role of the defendant in continuous, long-distance games of “Hangman” over the course of four eight-hour days in the exercise yard of the Old State Penitentiary.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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Binoculars were required by both the “prosecution” and the “defense” in order to decipher each other’s intentions.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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Since we had only learned the semaphore alphabet a few days prior to the performance, we often made mistakes. Defendants were hung who shouldn’t have been. Occasionally, the opposite would happen and a mis-read signal would result in the reprieve of a guilty individual.

Hang Man

Performance, (Collaboration with Valerie Wedel)

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As in the real world, we never really did try to keep track of the score.

Water Work

Performance

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In 2009, Art Inside the Park was held at County Park Lake in Jefferson City, Missouri. Twenty Artists from Missouri, New York City and Buenos Aires, Argentina were invited to contribute sculptural works for a four-day outdoor exhibition.

Water Work

Performance

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The central feature of the exhibition site, as the name suggests, was an eight-acre man-made lake. I had been thinking of doing a water-based action for some time and this gave me the opportunity to design a performance around the idea that some, if not most, human activities are as futile and repetitive as digging a hole in a lake.

Water Work

Performance

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With the help of several volunteer scuba divers, the Cole County parks maintenance guys were able to install a painter’s scaffold in about 12 feet of water that extended from the bottom of the lake to just below the surface. When wrapped in brown tarps, the scaffold was invisible from the shore which was approximately 50 feet away at its nearest point.

Water Work

Performance

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For each of the four days of the exhibit, fellow exhibitor Bob McGhee would row me out to the scaffold at 9 a.m. Dressed in generic male business attire, I would then begin digging as Bob rowed away, leaving me effectively stranded until his return at 5 p.m.

Water Work

Performance

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The visual effect thus created was one of a man who could seemingly walk on water but was unable to think of doing anything more significant with this ability than to keep himself busy with the expenditure of pointless effort.

Water Work

Performance

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Since it was October and getting chilly, I wore neoprene chest waders and a life-jacket under my extra-extra-large business suit. Even though I was willing to experience the fatigue of digging for eight hours and suffer for my art to a certain extent, I drew the line at hypothermia or drowning.

Water Work

Performance

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Again, lots of kids from mid-Missouri elementary schools came to the event in class-size groups of 20 to 30 children accompanied by adults.

Water Work

Performance

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From my perch in the lake I could hear the kids shouting and carrying on the way kids do interspersed with the barked commands of the chaperones trying to maintain order. Usually, the kids just ignored them.

Water Work

Performance

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However, one group went completely silent when their teacher shrieked “OH MY GOD, THAT’S MY LIFE OUT THERE!”